Databases are an integral component to applications that manage business and personal data. Application designers offload much of the storage, retrieval, and manipulation of large sets of data to databases. As the volume of data used by various applications has grown, so has the tendency to store that data on databases in remote locations, for retrieval across a network when needed.
There is a need to protect the privacy and confidentiality of data that is stored on the cloud or on machines in other remotely located networks. Encrypted database management systems (EDBMS) utilize encrypted data so that an adversary capable of viewing the transmitted or stored data is not able to interpret or otherwise access the plaintext content of the data.